Quotes About Rationalizations

We numb our pain through denial, blaming, rationalizations, addictions, and avoidance.

Classical psychoanalysis regards conscious thoughts as a disguised representation of unconscious conflicts that are presumably causing the problem. The patient's own explanations are regarded as spurious rationalizations, his coping mechanisms as defenses. Consequently, his conscious ideas, his reasoning and judgements, his practical solutions to problems are not taken at face value: they are treated as stepping-stones to deeper, concealed components of the mind.

All change begins with a change of mind the Bible calls repentance. Repentance is detecting and destroying the rationalizations that led to me checking the sinful choice box in the first place. Repentance is what every biblical prophet was calling for because that is where a man begins to move from depravity to quality.

Vicars, he often thought, are essentially God's lawyers on the earth. Interpreters of the law, the finders of nuance, sifters through rationalizations to get at the truth or the need of the moment. Guessers, in other words.

A neurosis defends itself by coming up with rationalizations to explain away bizarre behavior.

Buried under these rationalizations is a God-given intuition that serves as a compass to find authentic love. When women begin to doubt or ignore the voice of their conscience, they become their own worst enemies. They then wonder why love seems so elusive.

I would say that you have fallen into the commonest fallacy of all in dealing with social and economic subjects—the 'devil theory.' [...] You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity. [...] You think banders are scoundrels. They are not. Nor are company officials, nor patrons, nor the governing classes back on earth. Men are constrained by necessity and build up rationalizations to account for their acts.

5. Psychologist Barbara Honegger explains synchronicities by saying that the right brain hemisphere (where this circuit is located) moves you in space-time to the place where the synchronicity will occur, while the Rationalist left brain invents rationalizations to go there. Synchronicities are a language through which this circuit communicates with the left brain, in this theory. Try explaining coincidences by that theory. What messages is your right brain trying to send to your left brain?

Most therapy programs do little more than provide psychopaths with new excuses and rationalizations for their behavior and new insights into human vulnerability. They may learn new and better ways of manipulating other people, but they make little effort to change their own views and attitudes or to understand that other people have needs, feelings, and rights. In particular, attempts to teach psychopaths how to "really feel" remorse or empathy are doomed to failure.

Most therapy programs do little more than provide psychopaths with new excuses and rationalizations for their behavior and new insights into human vulnerability. They may learn new and better ways of manipulating other people.

It was all right that I should try to justify my honest feelings by all sorts of rationalizations. But sometimes the multifarious motives that my brain spun out would force feelings on me that came as a shock even to myself; and those feelings were not originally my own. Only in my hatred was there something authentic. For I myself was a person who should be moved with hate.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance, albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance, albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking process attempts to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of logic and plausibility.

Sometimes the world seemed to come with subtitles, like a foreign film. So help her, sometimes people's hidden motives, their lies, their rationalizations, were so pitifully apparent that Sophia felt she could just sit and read them.

Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.

When an atmosphere grows thick enough with justifications, explanations, rationalizations, postures, and regrets, not to omit occasional hostilities, untruth disappears just as surely as truth does.

Yet the only answer to science was more science. Neither was there a lack of clever rationalizations. The ethical way out of scientists who had built the "ultimate" nuclear weapon was that it would make war impossible. The Cercle Érasme had a similar purpose in mind: They were set on taking the power-mad giants even farther in the same direction.

The beast in man had lifted its mask and the time of euphemistic niceties and rationalizations was over.

All these would be rationalizations—the thing itself was glorious.

There is a collision course between the greed and rationalizations of the West and the force of nature; science and the planet are the casualties.

It was far more a cultivated ignorance of America's sins than innocence of them, and this ignorance was helped along by a culturally embedded pattern of rationalizations, bigotries, stereotypes, and lies.

I should have known better. But we all have stupid moments—rationalizations, even blindness, born of weakness and human need.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

And the Savior said that the very elect would be deceived by Lucifer if it were possible [see Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:22]. [Lucifer] will use his logic to confuse and his rationalizations to destroy. He will shade meanings, open doors an inch at a time, and lead from purest white through all the shades of gray to the darkest black.